Blog

The phrase “MRI for AI” rolls off the tongue with the seductive clarity of a metaphor that feels inevitable. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, describes the goal in precisely those terms, envisioning “the analogue of a highly precise and accurate MRI that would fully reveal the inner workings of an AI model” (Amodei, 2025, para. 6). The promise is epistemic X‑ray vision — peek inside the black box, label its cogs, excise its vices, certify its virtues.

Yet the metaphor is misguided not because the engineering is hard (it surely is) but because it mistakes what cognition is. An artificial mind, like a biological one, is not a spatial object whose secret can be exposed slice by slice. It is a dynamical pattern of distinctions sustained across time: self‑referential, operationally closed, and constitutionally allergic to purely third‑person capture. Attempting to exhaust that pattern with an interpretability scanner is as quixotic as hoping an fMRI might one day disclose why Kierkegaard chooses faith over reason in a single axial slice of BOLD contrast.

Phenomenology has warned us for more than a century that interiority is not an in‑there to be photographed but an ongoing enactment of world‑directed sense‑making. Husserl’s insight that “consciousness is always consciousness of something” (Ideas I, 1913) irreversibly welds experience to the horizon that occasions it; any observation from the outside forfeits the very structure it hopes to catch.